iNaturalist Class: Recap and Resources

We had a great class on Saturday, June 11, 2022, with about 60 people in attendance to hear Jon Rebman’s presentation on improving plant observations on iNaturalist. Jon showed us how important our plant observations are and why we should strive to make each observation the best that it can be. That means being disciplined in taking multiple photos for each observation—one photo that shows the plant as a whole, close-up photos of the top and bottom sides of leaves, the top and side view of flowers, photos of fruits, and any other special characteristics of the plant. If you have not done so, be sure to visit the San Diego Natural History Museum’s plant atlas website , where you will find the resources Jon discussed in his presentation, including the guidelines for What to Photograph, tools for mapping the distribution of plants, photographs of plants taken in the field in San Diego County, and more.

Please be sure that you have joined the San Diego County Plant Atlas Project on iNaturalist and that you have changed your membership setting to allow the curator to see actual coordinates no matter who adds the observation to the project. This is necessary because all observations of vascular plants in San Diego County are added to the project automatically and any sensitive plants have their coordinates obscured automatically. To be useful for science, the actual location of the observation must be available to Jon as curator of the project.

We were fortunate to have Dr. Rebman and Botanist Margie Mulligan (@madge) spend a Saturday morning with us, generously sharing their knowledge of the plants of our area. Special thanks to Fred Kramer (@fkramer) who helped plan and facilitate the meeting, and to Patricia Simpson (@patsimpson2000 ), Mark K. James (@markkjames), and Peter Thomas (@docprt) who served as group leaders for the outdoor part of the class. I’m sorry we were not able to accommodate the 15 people on the waitlist. If you missed this class, you may want to watch a video of Jon’s 2021 online presentation, “A Curator’s Guide to iNaturalist”(it’s also a great refresher even if you attended the recent class): https://youtu.be/w51CYaDRwmA.

Posted on June 13, 2022 09:29 PM by milliebasden